Coming Attractions

Morning opens its door on scoured light
and sweeps my cluttered rooms.

The sky’s been rinsed with wind.
The land bleached down to its bones.

October was a lit match—every shade
of tree on fire, the lawn a sheet

strewn with leaves redder than petals.
There are women who shouldn’t

wear mascara. There are poems of glass,
all windows, that you can open

to observe a ghost’s beating heart.
Note how each chamber

serves as its own paperweight—
how a wing’s blue pulse

is actually a lake that mirrors lightning.
The switch of our attention

flickers as the day scrolls down
to a hotel for professional snugglers

that might be a treasure map,
might be a brothel.

—

This selection comes from Lori Lamothe’s chapbook Diary in Irregular Ink, available from ELJ Publications. Purchase your copy here!

Lori Lamothe’s poetry has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Blackbird, CALYX, cream city review, Emerge Literary Journal, Seattle Review, Stone Highway Review, Third Coast, and other magazines. She is the author a full-length collection, Trace Elements (Aldrich Press), and of two other chapbooks, Camera Obscura (Finishing Line Press) and Ouija in Suburbia (dancing girl press, forthcoming 2015).

Marika von Zellen has a BA in English and Creative Writing from Cornell College (no, not the one in Ithaca). She’s had poetry and fiction published in Open Field, Temporary Infinity, The Grin City Monthly, and the anthology Rock & Roll Saved My Soul. As an Editorial Assistant for Sundress, she’s copy-edited the book Picture Dictionary (2014); as a freelance editor she copy-edited the photography book Face It (2013). In the summer of 2012, she attended the Grin City Collective Artist Residency in Iowa. Besides writing, she enjoys theoretical physics, playing piano, ghost-hunting, climbing trees, and drinking good Czech beer. She’s also a scholar of Lewis Carroll.

Witness

Normally, Inquisitorial tribunals were supposed to hear witness testimony
against the accused and base any verdict upon such testimony, but in this case
the only witness called was the accused herself… In the end, Cauchon would
convict her on the cross-dressing charge.
                                                                      —Joan of Arc, a brief biography

The voices always stood off to one side
and when I turned to look at the light head on

it swerved out of vision at the last second, blinding.
You say I’m mad because I cut my hair short,

wore amour into battle—yet the king before
believed he was made of glass, had iron rods

sewn into his clothes so he wouldn’t break.
You want me to kneel before you and dial

the precise combination for femininity—
drape my virginity in white, ravel out my hair

and let you climb until you reach satisfaction.
Listen: before the next feast you will burn

my body three times, sweep my bones
into a sack and hold it under running water.

Listen: tomorrow lightning will tattoo its image
across the executioner’s chest. In every dream

you will wander lost in a landscape of nightmare

—

This selection comes from Lori Lamothe’s chapbook Diary in Irregular Ink, available from ELJ Publications. Purchase your copy here!

Lori Lamothe’s poetry has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Blackbird, CALYX, cream city review, Emerge Literary Journal, Seattle Review, Stone Highway Review, Third Coast, and other magazines. She is the author a full-length collection, Trace Elements (Aldrich Press), and of two other chapbooks, Camera Obscura (Finishing Line Press) and Ouija in Suburbia (dancing girl press, forthcoming 2015).

Marika von Zellen has a BA in English and Creative Writing from Cornell College (no, not the one in Ithaca). She’s had poetry and fiction published in Open Field, Temporary Infinity, The Grin City Monthly, and the anthology Rock & Roll Saved My Soul. As an Editorial Assistant for Sundress, she’s copy-edited the book Picture Dictionary (2014); as a freelance editor she copy-edited the photography book Face It (2013). In the summer of 2012, she attended the Grin City Collective Artist Residency in Iowa. Besides writing, she enjoys theoretical physics, playing piano, ghost-hunting, climbing trees, and drinking good Czech beer. She’s also a scholar of Lewis Carroll.

2075

Our shirts will change color on cue,
we’ll order take-out with our sleeves

and if we meet for lunch in Paris
the spoons will float into our hands.

Every night the guy in the movie
will ditch the drop dead redhead

and step naked into our bedrooms.
The weather will be endless blue,

with rain falling over us like light
and darkness always raining sleep.

We’ll be 100 but look 19.
Our thighs will be thin, our lips

will be fat and we’ll all be blonde
without visible roots.

At five o’clock, when our cars
usher us into twilight

we’ll lean back
and watch the past blur by—

all seven dimensions of seeing
fanning out behind us, disappearing

faster than the velocity of perfection.

—

This selection comes from Lori Lamothe’s chapbook Diary in Irregular Ink, available from ELJ Publications. Purchase your copy here!

Lori Lamothe’s poetry has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Blackbird, CALYX, cream city review, Emerge Literary Journal, Seattle Review, Stone Highway Review, Third Coast, and other magazines. She is the author a full-length collection, Trace Elements (Aldrich Press), and of two other chapbooks, Camera Obscura (Finishing Line Press) and Ouija in Suburbia (dancing girl press, forthcoming 2015).

Marika von Zellen has a BA in English and Creative Writing from Cornell College (no, not the one in Ithaca). She’s had poetry and fiction published in Open Field, Temporary Infinity, The Grin City Monthly, and the anthology Rock & Roll Saved My Soul. As an Editorial Assistant for Sundress, she’s copy-edited the book Picture Dictionary (2014); as a freelance editor she copy-edited the photography book Face It (2013). In the summer of 2012, she attended the Grin City Collective Artist Residency in Iowa. Besides writing, she enjoys theoretical physics, playing piano, ghost-hunting, climbing trees, and drinking good Czech beer. She’s also a scholar of Lewis Carroll.

Mani-Pedi

Footbaths bubble sudsy rainbows
and Buddha laughs a silence golden

but then the chatter flows past me again
like a river around a rock.

I’m reading a book about physics,
underlining the lines I understand.

So far I have one. Its yellow ribbon
unravels to infinity

then disappears inside a mirror’s open door.
I don’t feel like a rock

more like a pebble. The woman next to me
is texting Spanish lovers

and from her leather throne
my daughter smiles and waves.

Against the far wall, rows of colors
stand at attention, a sparkly army

ready to conquer all mankind.
Every name is a promise—

Luna, Atlantis, Up All Night, Long Kiss.
According to the line I (don’t) understand

the Universe may be a single slice
in a loaf of cosmic bread.

—

This selection comes from Lori Lamothe’s chapbook Diary in Irregular Ink, available from ELJ Publications. Purchase your copy here!

Lori Lamothe’s poetry has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Blackbird, CALYX, cream city review, Emerge Literary Journal, Seattle Review, Stone Highway Review, Third Coast, and other magazines. She is the author a full-length collection, Trace Elements (Aldrich Press), and of two other chapbooks, Camera Obscura (Finishing Line Press) and Ouija in Suburbia (dancing girl press, forthcoming 2015).

Marika von Zellen has a BA in English and Creative Writing from Cornell College (no, not the one in Ithaca). She’s had poetry and fiction published in Open Field, Temporary Infinity, The Grin City Monthly, and the anthology Rock & Roll Saved My Soul. As an Editorial Assistant for Sundress, she’s copy-edited the book Picture Dictionary (2014); as a freelance editor she copy-edited the photography book Face It (2013). In the summer of 2012, she attended the Grin City Collective Artist Residency in Iowa. Besides writing, she enjoys theoretical physics, playing piano, ghost-hunting, climbing trees, and drinking good Czech beer. She’s also a scholar of Lewis Carroll.

Dance of the Unsquared Circles

To lure the taste of chocolate
out of chocolate, add salt.
It’s not the old equation,

only a recipe for sensibility.
Opposites don’t attract, just end up
like the couple that set fire to civility

and chalked a faultline down the center
of possession. Or it’s the other way around—
two people wearing their anger inside out

for twenty years—all that electricity
trapped behind a flickering of false lives.
Call it cold fusion, or misery, or lightning

minus light. Call it whatever you like.
The trick is to find out what charges what—
to know the differences that revolve

in imaginary spaces—
Andromeda and The Milky Way
caught in a waltz of mutual gravity.

Let cardinals bring out the snow in snow.
Let the tree behind bullet-proof glass,
its leaves spindling toward sun,

make you crave an infinity of ocean.
If you want me to love you
write a graffiti of rain-slick roads

across the Sahara of my distance,
tattoo a dusting of particles
onto the terra incognita of my fear.

—

This selection comes from Lori Lamothe’s chapbook Diary in Irregular Ink, available from ELJ Publications. Purchase your copy here!

Lori Lamothe’s poetry has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Blackbird, CALYX, cream city review, Emerge Literary Journal, Seattle Review, Stone Highway Review, Third Coast, and other magazines. She is the author a full-length collection, Trace Elements (Aldrich Press), and of two other chapbooks, Camera Obscura (Finishing Line Press) and Ouija in Suburbia (dancing girl press, forthcoming 2015).

Marika von Zellen has a BA in English and Creative Writing from Cornell College (no, not the one in Ithaca). She’s had poetry and fiction published in Open Field, Temporary Infinity, The Grin City Monthly, and the anthology Rock & Roll Saved My Soul. As an Editorial Assistant for Sundress, she’s copy-edited the book Picture Dictionary (2014); as a freelance editor she copy-edited the photography book Face It (2013). In the summer of 2012, she attended the Grin City Collective Artist Residency in Iowa. Besides writing, she enjoys theoretical physics, playing piano, ghost-hunting, climbing trees, and drinking good Czech beer. She’s also a scholar of Lewis Carroll.